


go hard

by deniigiq



Series: Dumpster Fires Verse [19]
Category: Daredevil (TV), Deadpool - All Media Types, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Best Friends, Blood and Injury, Emotionally Compromised, Emotionally Repressed, Gen, Major Character Injury, Near Death Experiences, Team Bonding, Team Dynamics, Team Red, Team as Family, but that doesn't mean they want to, matt and wade don't want to admit they care about peter, they do, this is the peter almost dies fic people have been asking for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-10
Updated: 2018-10-10
Packaged: 2019-07-29 06:59:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16259042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deniigiq/pseuds/deniigiq
Summary: No amount of anticipation could have prepared him for the day when he called his best friend’s name and Peter didn’t answer back.(Peter gets seriously hurt and Ned needs help. The others on Team Red come to lend a hand.)





	go hard

**Author's Note:**

> lots of talk of blood and injuries below in addition to matt and wade's complete inability to just say what they mean, please do what you need to to be safe, as per usual.

Ned had been waiting for this moment. Waiting for it for months now. For the other shoe, or the penny, or whatever it needed to be, to drop.

But no amount of anticipation could have prepared him for the day when he called his best friend’s name, and Peter didn’t answer back.

Nothing.

Nothing on tv. No video game or podcast or forum. No cheap school production or handbook or safety card.

Nothing.

They had a plan for this. They’d made a plan for this. Ned was supposed to check for the scale of the damage. The location of the bleeding. Potential bone breakages. Dislocations. If it was a five or higher on the scale—unconsciousness for more than a minute. Arterial bleeding. Severe head trauma. Slurring. Screaming. Visible bone--that was a hospital visit.

But his breathing was frozen and his pulse was throbbing and he couldn’t remember who he was supposed to call. Was it 911? Or May? Or Stark—was it Stark? He couldn’t remember. It was like everything had vanished and all that was left in his head was radio silence. The only messages being transmitted through his body were the ones making his hands go cold.

He didn’t know what to do, but he knew that Peter needed help and he needed it _now_. He could see the blood spreading, red fingers stretching out into clear, staining the water underneath Peter. He couldn’t tell where it was coming from. It could have been from anywhere.

His heart stopped seizing for exactly as long as it took to scream at the sky.

Then he got to fucking work.

 

 

Peter was floppy in Ned’s hands, not so much like a ragdoll, so much as an eel. The blood and the water made his limbs slippery and, even though Ned was more than aware that Peter was the lighter of the two of them, he’d suddenly seemed stupidly heavy. His head, when Ned managed to lift it, unsure what he was looking and feeling for but determined to find it, felt like solid weight, like a medicine ball in Ned’s palm.

He had to peel off the mask to figure out where the bleeding was coming from and, upon doing so, was stunned to find blood smeared across Peter’s face. His lip was split longways and his hair was sticky at his left temple. That whole side of his face was puffy and spiderwebbed with capillaries.

Head injury.

Unconsciousness for more than a minute.

This was hospital territory.

But how do you call an ambulance to the top of a building? How does that work? How were they supposed to get up there in time? How much was too much blood to lose? Peter was still losing blood. It couldn’t just be coming from his head.

Ned dug out his phone and tried to dial 911 but he was distracted with tearing down Peter’s suit to find the secondary source of bleeding.

He nearly gagged when he found it.

It was in the softness just above Peter’s hipbone. It looked like someone had fisted their knife, shoved in deep, and pulled _hard._ There wasn’t visible bone, but there was barely visible anything. The gaping wound was filled with a sickening pool of red, leaking down in little trickles, like tributaries off a river.

He ripped his phone from his ear and, with shaking fingers, scrolled through his contacts to find the emergency direct line to Mr. Stark. Peter needed someone _now_. He didn’t have time to wait for an ambulance.

It took multiple taps to get the phone to dial; his fingers kept skipping off it from the blood and the little flecks of water from the fog. It struck him while the call connected that that he had to put pressure on the wound and his gut twisted and wrenched at the thought.

The call went to voicemail.

He dialed again, shoved the phone between his ear and his shoulder and sucked in a breath. His friend was dying. He couldn’t afford to be just Ned Leeds right now, he had to be the best version of himself. He blew out the breath and then sunk his hands into the blood and the softness of Peter’s side. He didn’t wake up. The phone kept ringing. He pressed down and Peter made a soft noise. He tried to move away from the pressure, and Ned’s heart pounded and he couldn’t let him move. He pressed harder.

The phone was still ringing.

Fuck.

Peter groaned and his hands flexed and he lifted one and laid it on top of Ned’s. It was so, so pale. Peter didn’t seem to register that he was putting his hand into his own blood. His head lolled and he weakly shoved at the backs of Ned’s hands. He groaned louder.

Ned couldn’t see the skin on his hands anymore.

The line went to voicemail.

Fuck.

“Stop,” Peter whined. “Who’s--? Stop. Lemme go.”

He shifted his hip and Ned barked at him to stop, but he wasn’t understanding. He wasn’t coherent.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. What was he supposed to do? No Stark. No 911.

What was he supposed to do?

Peter scrabbled at his hands, but Ned knew if he took them off, he was done for, powers or no powers.

“Pete,” he managed to choke through his tears, “You need to stay still. You’re hurt. You need—”

And then there were hands on his. Bigger. Paler. Wide with rough callouses, busted knuckles over his own, holding his hands to the wound. A bracelet with wooden beads around one of the wrists.

Bare arms, all the way to the shoulder.

Mr. Murdock was drenched, he had to have run halfway across the city upon hearing Ned’s call. He wasn’t wearing his glasses and his chest heaved with his panting. He put off a crazy amount of heat as he pressed his shoulder to Ned’s and swore.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he snarled, “Keep up the pressure, don’t move.” He yanked the soaked t-shirt he was wearing over his head and pulled at one of the seams hard enough that it tore. He made Ned keep his hands still as he crammed the fabric through the gap made by the arch of Peter’s back and then looped it over top of Ned’s hands.

“On the count of three, you’re going to let go,” he ordered Ned. Ned didn’t think. Just nodded. Mr. Murdock hissed out the count and on three, Ned yanked his hands back and Mr. Murdock slapped the fabric down and tied it tight over the wound. The blood immediately started soaking through the makeshift bandage. Mr. Murdock ran his hands down the sides of Peter’s rucked up suit and dug out his phone. He shoved it towards Ned.

“Call Stark,” he demanded. “ _Now._ ”

 He had white, mottled scars up at the top of his chest and some serious bruising and scabbing all the way down his side. His hands didn’t shake, but his eyes flicked back and forth furiously.

Ned took the phone, put in Peter’s passcode and dialed Mr. Stark. His hands wouldn’t stop shaking. He almost dropped the phone.

Mr. Murdock had ripped out his own phone and was putting more pressure on Peter’s wound, holding him down firmly and ignoring his jerking and moaning in a way which Ned would never in his life be able to.

“Call Claire Temple,” he shouted at the phone. It started ringing. Claire Temple picked up immediately.

“Where are you?”

“The kid’s been fucking stabbed. Bleeding out now.”

“He movable?”

“Not sure, slurring, fighting.”

“Fighting’s good—”

Ned didn’t hear the rest of the conversation because Mr. Stark picked up with an exhausted, “Pete, what the fuck is going on?” And Ned was falling over his words.

Mr. Stark seemed to know instantly what was happening.

“I’m on my way, Ned, keep the phone on. Do not hang up. I’m on my way _now_. Stay there, put pressure on the wound—FRIDAY, get me Wilson on the phone NOW.”

“Wade, I need your ass here, yesterday,” Ned realized Mr. Murdock was shouting. “Kid’s down, we’re near yours, we need to get him somewhere before he goes into shock.”

“Gimme a cross street, I’m outside,” Deadpool’s tinny voice snapped back. Mr. Murdock called one back to him immediately.

“Ned?” Mr. Stark asked,  “Ned, is someone there with you?”

His heart was pounding and everyone was shouting and Peter was waking up in earnest now and had started to writhe in pain. He shoved against Mr. Murdock’s hands and threw his head from side to side, pleading for him to let go.

“Daredevil,” Ned breathed, “He’s helping Peter, he’s—”

“Daredevil,” Mr. Stark shouted, “What’s his condition?”

“Fucking critical,” Mr. Murdock called back, not bothering with his signature growl, “He’s getting cold, I gotta move him.”

“Don’t move him—”

“I am _not_ letting him go into fucking shock out here, Stark.”

“I’ve got a team on the way.”

Mr. Murdock rattled off an address.

“What?”

“Send your team to—Peter, you need to stay fucking still, do you hear me? You stay fucking still, it’s Double D, you _stay_ still—”

Peter started crying and Ned’s gut reaction to that, as it had been since they’d met in first grade, was to start crying with him, but he swallowed back the sobs because Mr. Murdock and Mr. Stark were going to help him. They were going to make sure he was okay. They weren’t going to let him die.

Ned blinked when a rough hand brushed his and swiped the phone out of it. He looked up and towering over him was a huge man. His face and arms were horrifying, twisted and puckered.

“Copy that, Stark, this is Deadpool. I’m taking the kid to mine. Got a medic on the way. Get your team there now.”

Mr. Stark must have confirmed because Deadpool pushed the phone back into Ned’s hands and clasped one of his own onto Ned’s shoulder tightly. He had brown eyes and a furrowed brow, but no eyelashes or eyebrows. The skin around his mouth was creased.

Peter screamed and Deadpool was gone in the space of a blink, over to his side, demanding that Mr. Murdock tell him the extent of the damage. Mr. Murdock rattled off a list of strains and fractures and wounds that Ned hadn’t even noticed. Couldn’t have noticed. How had Mr. Murdock noticed them? How do you notice a fracture?

Peter struggled against Mr. Murdock’s grasp, even though both Mr. Murdock and Deadpool shouted at him to stop. When he didn’t, Deadpool knelt down and grabbed his jaw and jerked it so that Peter’s chin was parallel to the rooftop.

“Kid, look at me.” Peter must not have because Deadpool yelled at him, “LOOK AT ME, PETER.” That got his attention and he stopped fighting and let his limbs go still. “You need to calm the fuck down or I’m gonna make you, alright?” Deadpool threatened.

Ned saw just the barest jiggle of Peter’s chin before Deadpool smoothed a hand over his hair.

“I’m sorry, buddy, didn’t mean to scare you. It’s going to be okay. We’re here, we’re not gonna let anything bad happen,” he soothed.

Peter must have been crying. His chest was shuddering like he was crying. Ned swallowed hard and realized that he was crying, too.

“We need to lift you, Pete,” Mr. Murdock told him with his hands and arms and chest stained red with Peter’s blood, “It’s going to hurt worse than anything you’ve ever felt, but we need to move now, okay? Wade, you want to--?”

“Yeah, I got him, you gonna--?”

“I’ve got it. Peter, I’ve gotta keep pressing hard on you. I’m so fucking sorry, kid. I know that hurts, but I can’t let go, so you’ve just gotta bear with me, alright?”

Peter whimpered and Deadpool crouched down low and slid an arm under his knees. Mr. Murdock jerked over his shoulder and called Ned over and calmly asked him to lift Peter’s head and neck so that Deadpool could get his other hand under his shoulders. Ned wiped his face onto the back of his wrist and set his jaw. He needed to get ahold of himself. He wasn’t the one dying here.

He jogged over to the other two and, leaning over Peter’s face, barely even recognized him through the pain and the blood on it. He lifted the back of Peter’s head as carefully and quickly as he could and pushed Peter’s shoulders forward a little bit and Deadpool managed to slide his arm underneath them.

“We’re going up on three, Red, hold steady,” he said. Mr. Murdock brought one of his knees up so that he could stand quicker. Deadpool counted and up they all went. Peter shouted in pain and sobbed and Deadpool had Ned push his head forward so that it was leaning on his shoulder.

And away they went.

 

 

Ned was the one who had to fish Deadpool’s keys out of his pocket and unlock his door. The other two scuffled in quickly in tandem and set Peter down on the floor of the living room. He was only halfway down before someone was pounding at the door.

Ned opened it and a woman crashed past him and threw herself down to her knees by Mr. Murdock. She started giving him and Wade instructions and felt along Peter’s head and down his chest and, after a harsh volley of questions and answers between her and Mr. Murdock, pulled his hands off Peter’s hip and untied the scraps of the t-shirt there to examine the wound. She called for gauze and Deadpool produced some out of a first aid kit he apparently kept under his couch.

Mr. Murdock stood up and then back and pressed his bloody hands against his neck. His eyes were wide and kept picking places around Peter to focus on. Deadpool seemed to have everything the nurse could have asked for in his first aid kit and before Ned knew it, she’d sterilized and packed the wound and the area around it and had taped the whole bandage down. She crooned to Peter softly while she did this.

There was another knock at the door.

“Red,” Deadpool said sharply. Mr. Murdock shook himself out of the weird, wide-eyed daze he’d been in and turned to duck out of sight. It took Ned’s rattled brain a long moment to realize that Deadpool was protecting his identity from Mr. Stark.

Deadpool met Ned’s eye and gestured to the door with his chin. Ned nodded and swallowed some breaths before going to open the door. Tony Stark and the Falcon were standing there, both in full super gear. The Falcon didn’t wait for Ned to say anything; he shoved past both Mr. Stark and Ned and stumbled to a halt in Deadpool’s living room upon seeing the nurse already there, talking gently to Peter while she felt the wound on his head.

Deadpool gave the Falcon a pretty fierce look. A Don’t-Fuck-With-Me look. Peter made a soft noise when the nurse pressed against his temple.

“You caught a good one, didn’t you, honey?” she asked lowly. “Really taking after your big brother, now, aren’t you?”

Deadpool snorted in amusement.

The Falcon tilted his head and cautiously made his way over to the nurse and knelt down next to her.

“Are we looking at a hospital?” he asked.

“I mean, preferably,” the nurse answered with a strong eyebrow. “For the concussion for sure. I can do the stitches here in a pinch, but I’m thinking he needs a scan or two to check for internal bleeding.”

The Falcon looked between her and Peter’s body a couple times before leaning forward and asking,

“Who _are_ you?”

“A nurse,” she said simply.

“Yeah, no shit. But who are you?”

The nurse didn’t say. Mr. Stark stepped forward and knelt down next to Peter who, Ned was relieved to find, was breathing much more normally, if pretty pained. He seemed lethargic. Mr. Stark touched his cheek, but he didn’t seem to see him. He was focused on staring over his shoulder, right at Ned.

Ned tried to give him a watery smile. He wasn’t sure if it worked because his entire body felt like it was sagging. It must have been something, though, because Peter made a little gesture towards him before the adults pulled him back down and told him to stay still.

Mr. Murdock came out of Deadpool’s bedroom wearing a long sleeved shirt that hung over his hands and with a stolen beanie pulled down low over half his face. He crossed his arms tightly over his chest and leaned against the doorframe, as though watching the others. He didn’t say anything, but he still had Peter’s blood on his face and neck where he’d pressed his hands.

He seemed to notice Ned and waved him over with a tip of his head. He wasn’t sure he could walk without stumbling, but he managed it. Mr. Murdock pulled him gently out of the living room, into the darkened hallway between it and Deadpool’s bedroom. The lack of light should have been scary, but after all the stimulation from before, Ned found that the dark brought a bit of relief with it. Mr. Murdock grasped his shoulder.

“You did so good, kid,” he said softly, “So good. You saved his life. What you did back there, that saved his life. And I know it probably doesn’t feel like it now, but once all that other shit you’re feeling wears off, you should be proud of yourself, bud. It’s no easy feat to step up like that.”

He swallowed and the feeling of wanting to cry came back. He hadn’t done that much, he really hadn’t. He’d barely kept it together until Mr. Murdock had gotten there and then after that, he’d just followed orders and stood back to let them work.

Mr. Murdock’s lips twitched downward and tipped his head again. He shuffled a bit and then held out his arms a little bit. And waited.

Ned realized he was offering a hug.

And yeah, he barely knew Mr. Murdock, but Ned was not in a position to refuse comfort after the shit he’d just been through, so he decided, what the fuck, yeah, he deserved a hug from someone at the very least.

Mr. Murdock was hard with muscle and he smelt like blood. He wasn’t great at hugging. He managed to be too strong and bony and unsure of himself all the same time, but he was trying at least. He hugged Ned back tight and for the first time, Ned noticed the little tremor in his shoulders.

He’d been scared, too. He was just better at hiding it.

Ned gave him an extra squeeze which surprised him and made him huff a little laugh.

“I’m not panicking,” he said with a little grin, “ _You’re_ panicking.”

Ned found himself grinning a little bit too. Mr. Murdock pulled away gently and smoothed down his beanie and borrowed shirt.

“This never happened,” he told Ned with a finger in his direction.

Ned covered his mouth to contain the slightly hysterical giggle that wanted to escape.

 

 

Peter ended up getting a one-way ticket to Mr. Stark’s medical bay and spending a fun week there, getting fussed over by every single Avenger until he was pleading to be released to recover at home.

No can do, sir.

You dance with death, you pay the consequences.

May had a lot of emotions and spent like, four of them squeezing the life out of Ned. Once done, she explained that Mr. Murdock had contacted her to tell her the role Ned had played in the whole mess. Ned pointed out that it was Mr. Murdock who had done most of the early heavy lifting and she said that they were both her heroes and that eventually, she was going to get it through Mr. Murdock’s head that he was allowed to take credit for doing good things for people occasionally.

Apparently, he’d thrown all of it onto Ned and Wade and said he’d just been there to lend a t-shirt.

Which was the craziest thing Ned had heard in his life.

“I think he was just scared,” he confided in May. She snickered.

“I think he was major scared, him and Wade both,” she said, “And I think they’re trying to pretend that they don’t care as much as they do.”

 

 

Peter had a lot of emotions about what had happened to him, too, and, because he was truly his aunt’s kid, he spent at least five of them squeezing the crap out of Ned from his bed.

“Dude,” he gasped, because fuck, that was super-strength, dear god.

“You just mean so much to me,” Peter blubbered and creaked, all tears and snot and bruises. “I would have died on that rooftop if you hadn’t found me.”

What was he supposed to say to that?

“Yeah, well. I wasn’t gonna leave you there,” he decided to go with.

He wasn’t sure if that it was the right or the wrong thing to say because Peter just got tearier and snottier.

“I’ll make it up to you,” he promised.

“Dude, you don’t have to make it up to me, just, I dunno. Be more careful next time,” Ned said with a shrug.

Somewhere in that emotional disaster was an affirmative, he was pretty sure.

 

 

Deadpool came to visit Peter and did his best to lay all over every part of the bed he was not currently occupying. He generally made a nuisance of himself and antagonized Mr. Stark at every waking opportunity for the first two hours he was there. But then right before he took off, out of nowhere, he shot out one of his huge hands and locked it around Peter’s jaw. He forced Peter to stare him dead in the eyes like he had when Peter had been fighting them on the roof.

“You pull that shit again and I will kill you my fucking self, do you understand?” he said, low and even and dangerous.

Peter, unlike Ned, did not get whiplash from the sudden threat. He nodded into the palm of the hand around his chin.

“I understand. I’m sorry for scaring you, Wade,” he said solemnly.

“I never should have gotten close to you,” Deadpool snarled in response.

“I’m gonna be alright, Wade, I promise,” Peter told him.

Deadpool released Peter’s face and melted cautiously back into his primary personality. He ruffled Peter’s hair, and for good measure, did it again with more feeling. He sidled over to Ned and ruffled his hair while he was at it. He gave them both a wink and finger guns before spinning around, around the doorframe of the room and out of sight.

Peter didn’t act like anything surreal had just happened, so Ned had no choice but to follow suit.

 

 

Mr. Murdock eventually came to visit, too, dragged by Mr. Nelson who damn near strangled Peter in a hug before damn near strangling Ned in an even tighter one.

He’d prepared a whole speech on the way over about the unfair amount of drama and stress _some_ people inevitably kicked up at the expense of some _other_ people who were constantly clinging to their sanity by their fingertips alone. _Some_ people, he also noted, were allowed to expand their emotional range beyond that of a subway rat, and _some_ people might feel better after maybe talking through said emotions to some other people, who may or may not be in their presence currently.

Matthew.

Mr. Nelson had evidently worked out at some point in their friendship that the best way to get Mr. Murdock to do what he wanted was through indiscreet public shaming. And Ned found himself doing something new and terrifying which was deciding if the same might work on Peter.

It wouldn’t.

Peter shamed himself before anyone else could even get there.

 Mr. Murdock cleared his throat and stiffly turned to Peter. He started to say something but stopped himself before he could even get the words out. Mr. Nelson raised an eyebrow at him expectantly. He seemed to recognize this and tried again to no avail. Peter cocked his head and waited silently.

Despite this, Mr. Murdock couldn’t seem to make words happen and appeared legitimately frustrated with himself. He had a tic, Ned realized. He rubbed his right thumb against his fore and middle fingers of the same hand.

Peter looked at Mr. Nelson for guidance after a now-awkward period of silence.

“Matty, you are making this so hard,” Mr. Nelson observed overly sympathetically to the room. Mr. Murdock grimaced at him and caught himself doing the tic. He balled his fingers into a fist.

“You aren’t my brother,” he snapped at Peter, “I resent the suggestion, firstly, because the idea is horrifying and secondly, because I am a terrible role model and you shouldn’t do anything I do or say, including being a moron and biting off more than you can chew—And I don’t care what you do when we’re not working as a team, but it would behoove myself and Wade if you didn’t die. Or nearly die. Or almost nearly die.”

Mr. Nelson watched this with a vaguely interested look on his face. Peter didn’t know how to respond, understandably. But Mr. Nelson didn’t jump in to help things along this time, so Peter had to take the plunge himself.

“Uh, okay?” he tried. “I’ll try not to die or nearly die in future?”

“Or almost nearly die,” Mr. Murdock insisted. Peter glanced at Ned for help, but Ned didn’t have anything for him.

“Or almost nearly die?”

Mr. Murdock nodded, satisfied with this. Mr. Nelson rolled his eyes.

“That was very good, Matty,” he said patronizingly, “You even almost got to the point.”

“Yes, I thought so, too, and now we have to go,” Mr. Murdock announced and grabbed Mr. Nelson’s elbow with undue force. He dragged him out of the room as quickly as possible.

He didn’t even try not to be awkward about it.

As soon as they were gone, Peter turned to Ned and mouthed “what the fuck,” and he just laughed.

“I think maybe he’s trying to say he cares about you a lot,” he offered.

“Yeah, no. I get that,” Peter clarified, “It’s just kind of amazing how painful that is for him to deal with. Wade’s at least straightforward about it.”

He did have a point there. Even if Deadpool was possibly a psychopath.

 

 

The next time Ned was around when Peter got hurt, they were both twenty and he had the joy of Peter being conscious at least, and walking him through the steps of how to extract a bullet from his best friend’s ass.

It was intimate.

It was uncomfortable.

And neither Deadpool or Daredevil was around to lend a hand.

But despite this, in that moment Ned acquired the perfect ammunition (literally) to get Peter to do what he wanted. And he would be damned before anyone took that from him.

Silver linings, man.

**Author's Note:**

> y'all i spent 5 hours looking for pictures of historic sweets and sweet shops today. and this is not the first time this has happened this week much less this month. this is what i'm doing with my life now. fuck.


End file.
